Repeat of 2014 trend
The latest landslide victory in the latest Assembly polls especially in UP and Uttrakhand makes the BJP an indomitable political force across the country. Though the Punjab victory is a consolation for Congress, the real story is in UP as it is considered as political heavy weight in India's politics. On the other side, Rahul Gandhi's leadership will face searching questions after its drubbing.
BJP has given a tough fight to the Congress in Manipur, where it was earlier a non-entity, and is neck-and-neck in Goa, despite anti-incumbency. BJP has formed the government in Goa and heading for ruling in Manipur in a less than agreeable arrangement.
The scenario is contradicting the long-established narrative that strong regional leaders are needed to win State elections, Prime Minister Modi today is bigger than his party and demonstrated that his party needs no saleable face as a chief ministerial candidate. This is like revisiting to the days of Indira Gandhi, when she dwarfed Congress satraps, and was the star campaigner for the party across States. However, a parallel cannot be drawn with the Congress, which is now in terminal decline.
BJP could retain nearly 40 per cent vote share in this election, indicating that the vote 2017 is a clear continuity of the 2014 trend. Shunning its urban-upper caste image, the BJP could consummately work out its caste arithmetic by giving at least 148 seats to members of other backward classes (OBCs) in UP.
The BJP's ideological core and many of its foot soldiers and leaders are drawn from the RSS, which steers clear of electoral politics and maintains a clearheaded vision of its agenda. The BJP has little to worry about its organisational strengths and weaknesses, so long as the Modi brand sells.
The SP-Congress combine failed to beat the anti-incumbency incurred by Akhilesh regime. The performance of Congress is much more deplorable as it could win less than 10 per cent seats it contested in coalition. Alliance with Congress failed to deliver rich dividends for SP.
More than anything else it is the scale of victory that has stunned pollsters, even though some exit polls had predicted that BJP was likely to end up as the single largest party in UP this time. But all projections about the Prime Minister paying dearly for his demonetisation gambit did not come off; rather, the suspicion is that in the class struggle narrative Modi adopted, cash ban was seen by the have-nots as a move to take down the filthy rich.
